ABC Election Coverage: 2007 New South Wales Election

Cabramatta

Outer South-West Suburbs

Very Safe Labor 31.4%

MP

Reba Meagher (ALP) since a 1994 by-election. Minister for Community Services, Youth, Aboriginal Affairs and Minister Assisting the Premier on Citizenship.

Profile

An electorate with a huge South-east Asian population. It includes the suburbs of Cabramatta, Canley Vale, Lansvale, St Johns Park, Mount Pritchard and Bonnyrigg. The origin of the electorate's ethnic make-up is the old Cabramatta Migrant Hostel, where many of the first Vietnamese refugees and migrants were settled on arrival in Australia.

Redistribution

There have been changes to all the boundaries of Cabramatta, but none of them make the remotest political impact on Labor's hold on this seat. On paper, Labor's margin falls from 31.7% to 31.4%.

History/Trivia

Created prior to the 1981 election, Cabramatta was won at its first contest by Wran government Minister Eric Bedford, defeating the Liberal Party's Kerry Chikarovski in her first run for Parliament. (Doing the hard yards in an unwinnable seat often earns brownie points for later tilts at pre-selection in more winnable seats.) Bedford was succeeded by John Newman in 1985, and he held the seat until he was murdered in late 1994. With local Labor Party branches under a cloud due to rampant branch stacking, ALP Head Office imposed former Young Labor President Reba Meagher as the new candidate, and she won the seat at the October 1994 by-election. In a seat where the Labor Party has less problems with the Liberal party than groups like Unity with strong roots in local ethnic communities, Meagher easily withstood Independent challenges at both the 1999 and 2003 elections.